Devil Inside (15 page)

“For the most part?”

“Yeah, like I said, some are difficult, some are crazy.  But if you do your job the Praesidio will support you.  There isn’t much point in asking someone to do something they don’t want to do, or can’t.  If you kill Ignis, try not to start trouble with the Lux or the humans--then you will be fine.”

Harley could tell that he believed that so she took comfort in that.  “And you said that it doesn’t really hurt to become a Nocte?”

“It’s different for different people.  Pain is subjective.  Physically—not much happens to your body.  And for what does happen you aren’t conscious—so what you feel physically is going to be limited.  Emotionally—that’s not something that I can tell you.  That’s what most different for everyone.”

Harley could easily believe that.  People handled emotional shock and mental trauma differently.  Nothing seemed like it could be worse than what she had already been through in her life.  Some rational part of her brain tried to point out that she wasn’t in the best state of mind to judge what kind of emotional and mental events in an unbiased way right now.  But that small rational voice wasn’t loud enough to drown out the louder—reckless part of her brain that was currently clamoring for attention.

Levi was quiet for several minutes before he spoke again.  “One other thing I have to point out—it’s a big one.”  Harley stiffened, preparing herself, feeling like this was the other shoe finally dropping.  “The Nocte—we can’t have children,” he added.

“Oh,” Harley was thoughtful. 
Is that a deal breaker
?  She hadn’t ever planned on having kids, but she hadn’t ever been told that she couldn’t and it took some thinking to figure out how she felt about that.  When she tried to imagine herself with a child she didn’t get warm fuzzy feelings.  Instead, it just reminded her of what it felt like to be a child—and to be at the mercy of the people who were supposed to be taking care of you.  It wasn’t a good feeling.  Even though she knew that she wouldn’t do the things that her parents had done—she didn’t feel like she could give enough of herself to a child to be fair.  She shook her head coming to the conclusion she had begun with.

“I never planned on having children.  I’m fine with not having them,” she said simply.

Levi tilted his head back and looked at her, “Are you sure about that?  Once you make this decision, you can’t go back.  If the bond takes the only way to break it is to die.”

Harley took a deep breath and turned away from Levi’s gaze.  Looking out the window and into the darkness she made her final decision.  “I can live with that.”

The sun began to peak out of the horizon a short time later so Harley and Levi went to bed and this time she didn’t have any trouble falling asleep.  She lay in the bed with Levi curled around her back and let the exhaustion, both mental and physical, pull her down into the darkness of sleep.  It felt like only minutes later when she woke up coughing and choking—clawing at her throat.  Levi had snapped awake with her when she bolted upright in bed.  He rubbed her back and waited for her to catch her breath.  She gulped for air, trying to convince her body that she wasn’t drowning in smoke.

She could still feel the burn in her lungs and throat as she sat in bed trying to catch her breath.  She could smell the fire as if it just happened and her breath caught in her throat.  When she felt more in control of herself she looked back at Levi.  He lay in the bed, only half awake, continuing to rub her back.

“Are you OK?” he croaked.

Harley nodded, not trusting herself to speak yet.  Her brain had figured out that it had all been a dream, but her body was still playing catch up.  Her heart still pounded against her ribs and her lungs still burned.  She scooted away from Levi and slid out of bed.  The sun was still up, but she wasn’t going to be able to go back to sleep after the rush of adrenaline from the dream.  Levi sat up in bed letting the blanket fall to his waist.  He squinted at her and rubbed his eyes.  The light peeked around the curtains casting a dim glow on his bare skin.  She could just make out the sturdy muscles that flexed beneath his tattoo.  From the pit of her stomach she felt the twitch of longing.  She wanted to climb back into bed and curl against him underneath his arm and trace her finger along those lines etched into his skin.  She knew that he would make her feel safe and she may even possibly find sleep again before the sun set.  But she slammed the door on that thought and pulled her jeans on underneath the tee-shirt she had slept in.

“I’m going to go get some air,” she said without looking at him.

Levi looked like he wanted to argue for a minute.  But either he knew that it wouldn’t do any good, or he didn’t have the energy, or some combination of the two.  Instead, he just nodded, “Remember, stay alert, call for me if you see or hear anything weird.  Anything.”

Harley nodded her agreement and silently slipped out of the bedroom door.  If she had stayed with Levi she knew that she would have been compelled to explain the dream.  She had seen the curious look in Levi’s eyes as he watched her regain her composure.  She knew that he wouldn’t have forced her to tell him but she didn’t want to lay there with him looking at her like he was worried about her either.

Harley stepped into the cool, late afternoon air and took a deep breath.  The clean and crisp air cleared away the last of the burning in her lungs.  Now her body just felt raw and empty.  She sat on the wooden porch swing and drew her legs up underneath her.  She didn’t want to remember that night from her childhood but the images continued to flash chaotically across her mind.  She watched two squirrels chase after each other rolling over one another playfully.  The incongruity jarred against the memory of her parents rolling over each other.  Their actions hadn’t been playful.  They had been full of rage and anger and frenzy.  They didn’t even seem to pay attention to the flames that scorched the walls of their ramshackle house.  Harley had hid under the table unable to leave her parents or save herself.  Some primal part of her kept waiting for her parents to realize the danger and remember her and when they remembered her they would come and sweep her up and get them all out of the house.  But that hadn’t happened.  Someone else had scooped her up from under the table.

She didn’t see the person, or hear them, before they pulled her backwards away from the fire and her parents and the table.  It was the movement of someone yanking her up from underneath her shelter that had broken the dazed state that she was in and she finally began screaming.  She didn’t fight the person holding her, but as she watched her parents fight under the flames a shrill piercing scream broke from within her.  When the person carrying her cradled her to their chest she was finally able to see who had her.  It was Andy, the young man who lived with his wife next door.  They had always been nice to her.  They had always given her food or candy and let her play in their back yard with their dog after Digger had been taken away.  She didn’t stop screaming until she was outside the house clutching Andy and watching her home and parents burn.

Later, the she had overheard the police talking to Andy and his wife Tally.  They had heard the fighting but before they had a chance to call the police the small, rundown house had caught fire.  Andy ran in to get Harley out.  She heard him tell the policeman that he had not even considered going back inside for her parents.  He said it both angrily and sadly.  He had explained to the cop how often the Finn’s fought.  How once John Finn had spent the entire night passed out in the front yard.  He told them about the string of men that Mary Finn had brought into the house in front of both her husband and her daughter.  Harley had been embarrassed at hearing her life described to this stranger.  She was embarrassed that even Andy knew the things her parents had done.  She may have only been seven, but she knew that her parents were bad people.  It had made her sad and embarrassed for other people to know.

She had been sent to foster care after that.  The lady from CPS had tried to tell her nicely that her parents had died in the fire.  But how can you say something like that nicely to a seven year old?  Harley had cried silently.  She only knew that she was crying because she could feel the tears running down her cheeks.  The lady kept looking at her funny and that’s when she realized that she was smiling as she cried.  The nice lady hadn’t questioned Harley’s response.  It wasn’t surprising that a child that had lived through what Harley lived through could both be happy and sad about her parent’s deaths.  She just smiled at Harley sadly.

She had lived in one foster home after another until she turned eighteen.  Some were better than others.  All of them better than the home that had burned.  She made good grades and stayed out of trouble.  She had learned that this was the best way to coast through the many homes that she had lived in.  If she stayed away from trouble, trouble usually stayed away from her.  It was high school before she found a real home.  She met Jamie in school and began spending more and more time at Jamie’s house.  The Andrews had always made her feel welcome, as if she was part of the family.  Not in a way that they pitied her.  But as truly part of the family.  She had chores and a curfew on the nights that she stayed with them—she finally had parents who parented.  Her foster family didn’t care where she was.  They weren’t cruel or mean.  They just didn’t care all that much about her, they just wanted their check for taking her in.  As long as she wasn’t getting into trouble, thus bringing trouble to them, they seemed glad she wasn’t around much.  The regularity of the Andrews’ home had been exactly what Harley needed.  She needed parenting and they gave it to her.  She had needed a sister to share secrets with and giggle under the blankets talking about boys and how much they both hated Laura Bollson making fun of Harley’s clothes.  Jamie had been that sister.  The ache of losing Jamie still stabbed at her heart and threatened to take her breath away.

As the cool evening air cleared away some of the lingering adrenaline that had followed the dream the images started coming back to her with more clarity that when she had first woken up.  In the dream she had been a child again.  She hugged her teddy bear and huddled underneath the table while she tried to drown out the sounds of her parents fighting.  Her father was raging and breaking things while her mother followed him around laughing and goading him.  She tossed insults and taunts at him fueling his fury.  Even from across the room she had been able to make out their glassy-eyed glares that warned her that they were drunk and/or high.  Normally, she went outside and hid with Digger when her parents had been in that state.  But Digger was gone and she didn’t want to stay in his empty dog house.

Harley forced herself to focus on the lingering images of her mother and father’s faces from the dream.  As a child she hadn’t been able to tell the difference between her mother and father’s states.  Her father’s eyes sparkled and shone with the alcohol and drugged out glaze of a junkie.  His skin had been grubby and pock marked with the tell-tale signs of his most recent binge.  His clothes were rumpled and dirty and even though she couldn’t smell him from across the room, Harley remembered what he smelled like in that state.  Rank and sour body odor permeated from underneath the smell of liquor and other chemicals.  Her mother, on the other hand, had looked clean and fairly well groomed.  In the past, her perception had been dulled by terror and sadness.  However, now observing the events in a dream eighteen years later, Harley saw that her mother had been different from her father.  Her mother’s eyes had given off a different kind of shine.  Her eyes had glinted with animal light as she stalked after her father, laughing at him maniacally. 

In the grip of the dream, Harley had tried to telling herself to move, to get up and run.  She knew how this fight ended and her 25 year old self had screamed at her seven year old body to do something.  The memory of that night was so strong and clear in the dream that, for a moment, Harley forgotten that it was just a dream.  Some part of her had been convinced that if she could just get this little girl to crawl out from underneath the table and do something, things might turn out differently.  Maybe she could call the police.  Maybe she could get her parents attention enough to divert them from the path they were on.  Maybe one of them would get angry enough to chase her out of the house and away from the other.  If only she could separate them things would turn out different.  But no matter how much Harley struggled and fought, she had only been an observer.  Eighteen years ago she had been unable to find the courage to crawl out from underneath her hiding spot and she couldn’t change the past through a dream.

She watched the sun sinking below the horizon.  She let the images of her parents come back to her.  She tried to remember how they looked as they fought that last night.  Both of them had glassy-eyed stares.  As she tried to reconstruct the images Harley kept seeing that her mother’s eyes had glinted and shone like an animal as opposed to her father’s heated dazed stare.  But Harley wasn’t sure if she was remembering the difference between them accurately or not.  There was a possibility that her current knowledge was coloring the past.  Maybe her brain was trying to find reason in her parent’s madness.  But the possibility that her mother was a Burner gnawed at her.  It didn’t seem far-fetched to her-–now knowing what she knew.  Her father might have been the more obviously brutal parent.  But it was her mother that instigated things.  It was her idea to sell Digger.  It was her mother than taunted her father and pushed him until he lashed out and hit her or Harley.  She could still hear the sound of her mother laughing and her father raging.  She had been very young the last time that she saw her parents, but she remembered them and their ways very vividly.  Even a seven year old had a hard time forgetting those kinds of details.